Showing posts from category Africa.
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Is the White Ribbon the New Black? Making Maternal Health Fashionable
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Celebrity philanthropists such as Bono, Angelina Jolie, and George Clooney have shined their star power on global issues like AIDS, genocide, and refugees. In last month’s Vogue, supermodel Christy Turlington turned the light on one of the most overlooked problems: maternal mortality.
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Weekly Reading
›In an Economist.com debate on population growth between John Seager of Population Connection and Michael Lind of the New America Foundation, Seager argues that rapid population growth is “the source of many of the world’s—especially the poor world’s—woes,” as it accelerates environmental degradation and “undermines both security and development.” On the other hand, Lind counters that “countries are not poor because they have too many people,” and asserts that “technology and increased efficiency have refuted what looks like imminent resource exhaustion.”
In Foreign Policy, David J. Rothkopf contends that actions to mitigate climate change—though necessary to avoid very serious consequences—could subsequently spur trade wars, destabilize petro-states, and exacerbate conflict over water and newly important mineral resources (including lithium).
The International Crisis Group (ICG) reports that “the exploitation of oil has contributed greatly to the deterioration of governance in Chad and to a succession of rebellions and political crises” since construction of the World Bank-financed Chad-Cameroon pipeline was completed in 2003. Chad must reform its management of oil resources in order to avoid further impoverishment and destabilization, ICG advises.
The Royal Society and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IME)—both based in the United Kingdom—released independent reports on geoengineering the climate. While calling reduction of greenhouse gas emissions “the safest and most predictable method of moderating climate change,” the Royal Society recommends that governments and international experts look into three techniques with the most potential: CO2 capture from ambient air, enhanced weathering, and land use and afforestation. The IME identified artificial trees, algae-coated buildings, and reflective buildings as the most promising alternatives. “Geo-engineering is no silver bullet, it just buys us time,” IME’s Tim Fox told the Guardian.
In “Securing America’s Future: Enhancing Our National Security by Reducing Oil Dependence and Environmental Damage,” the Center for American Progress (CAP) argues that unless the United States switches to other fuels, it “will become more invested in the volatile Middle East, more dependent on corrupt and unsavory regimes, and more involved with politically unstable countries. In fact, it may be forced to choose between maintaining an effective foreign policy or a consistent energy supply.”
The Chinese government is “drawing up plans to prohibit or restrict exports of rare earth metals that are produced only in China and play a vital role in cutting edge technology, from hybrid cars and catalytic converters, to superconductors, and precision-guided weapons,” The Telegraph relates. The move could send other countries scrambling to find replacement sources.
In studying the vulnerability of South Africa’s agricultural sector to climate change, the International Food Policy Research Institute finds that “the regions most vulnerable to climate change and variability also have a higher capacity to adapt to climate change…[and that] vulnerability to climate change and variability is intrinsically linked with social and economic development.” South African policymakers must “integrate adaptation measures into sustainable development strategies,” the group explains. -
Weekly Reading
›Christian Aid’s “Growing Pains: The Possibilities and Problems of Biofuels” finds that “huge subsidies and targets in developed countries for boosting the production of fuels from plants such as maize and palm oil are exacerbating environmental and social problems in poor nations.”
Framing the climate change debate in terms of national security could help advance climate legislation in Congress, argues a New York Times editorial, one week after its front-page article on the topic. In letters to the editor, James Morin of Operation FREE calls climate change the “ultimate destabilizer,” and retired Vice Admiral Lee Gunn warned that the “repercussions of these changes are not as far off as one would think.”
Researchers at Purdue University’s Climate Change Research Center found that climate change could deepen poverty, especially in urban areas of developing countries, by increasing food prices. “While those who work in agriculture would have some benefit from higher grains prices, the urban poor would only get the negative effects.” Of the 16 countries studied, “Bangladesh, Mexico and Zambia showed the greatest percentage of the population entering poverty in the wake of extreme drought.”
India’s 2009 State of the Environment Report finds that almost half of the country’s land is environmentally degraded, air pollution is increasing, and biodiversity is decreasing. In addition, the report points out that almost 700 million rural people—more than half the country’s population—are directly dependent on climate-sensitive resources for their subsistence and livelihoods. And furthermore, “the adaptive capacity of dry land farmers, forest dwellers, fisher folk and nomadic shepherds is very low.”
Surveys completed by a Cambodian national indigenous peoples network find that “five million hectares of land belonging to indigenous minority peoples [have] been appropriated for mining and agricultural land concessions in the past five years,” reports the Phnom Penh Post.
The Economic Report on Africa 2009 warns that despite declining food prices, “many African countries continue to suffer from food shortage and food insecurity due to drought, conflicts and rigid supply conditions among other factors.” -
Weekly Reading
›The Population Reference Bureau’s 2009 World Population Data Sheet shows that global population numbers will reach 7 billion in 2011. Among its key findings, PRB notes that “population growth is one root cause of increases in global greenhouse gas emissions. But the complexity of the mechanisms through which demographic factors affect emissions is not fully taken into consideration in many analyses that influence governments’ climate change mitigation efforts.”
The Guardian reports that U.S. marines have launched an energy audit of American military operations in Afghanistan, the first such assessment to take place in a war zone. “Some 80% of US military casualties in Afghanistan are due to improvised explosive devices (IEDS),” the article elaborates, “and many of those placed in the path of supply convoys.” DoD’s Alan Shaffer recently told ClimateWire, “nearly three-quarters of what convoys move in Afghanistan’s treacherous terrain is fuel or water.”
The Department of State released an inspection of the operations of the Bureau of African Affairs that identifies a rift between U.S. diplomats and the U.S. military’s recently established African Command (AFRICOM). As the Wilson Center’s Steve McDonald told Bloomberg.com, “It got off to a hugely bad start…Part of it was tied up with policies of the Bush era, where our own security concerns far overrode any sensitivities to local considerations.”
T. Paul Shultz of Yale University’s Economic Growth Center evaluates population and health policies, looking specifically at “the causal relationships between economic development, health outcomes, and reproductive behavior.”
Oxfam’s “The Future is Here: Climate Change in the Pacific” includes recommendations for adapting and mitigating climate change in Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific island nations—a region “where half the population lives within 1.5 kilometers of the sea.” -
Copenhagen’s Chance to Reduce Poverty and Improve Human Security
›The climate community is under increasing pressure to help the developing world, especially those at the “bottom of the pyramid.” The people who did the least to cause climate change will suffer its effects the most.
A critical part of the solution to this problem will be enhancing market-based incentives for climate-friendly behavior. The projects that generate credits for sale in the carbon markets vary widely in scale. However, the most successful have focused on large, localized sites, such as the smoke stack of a single plant. These “centimeter-wide, kilometer-deep” projects are easy to monitor and verify.
In contrast, most projects that benefit the poor are “a kilometer wide, a centimeter deep,” with each family across a large territory producing a small emissions reduction. Monitoring and tracking these community-based projects is usually cost-prohibitive.
DRC: Reducing Emissions and Improving Security
A Mercy Corps project in the refugee camps in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) seeks to improve the security of women and children while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions.
In the war-ravaged province of North Kivu, the total number of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) exceeds 850,000. Demand for resources, particularly fuel wood, vastly exceeds the available supply. To collect wood, women and children have to leave the relative safety of the refugee camps, making them vulnerable to sexual assault and child abduction by rebel groups and the army. Mercy Corps surveys indicate that nine percent of women in camps have been raped or otherwise assaulted.
Mercy Corps installs fuel-efficient stoves that reduce the need for dangerous trips into the forest. A commercial carbon broker develops carbon credits from the reduction in emissions that arises from the use of stoves instead of open fires. The upfront funding from the broker supplements a UNHCR grant supporting the project, and serves to help more than 20,000 families in one of the most dangerous places on Earth.
This extreme example is one of relatively few carbon projects generating revenue that benefits vulnerable people. Yet if this kind of project can be successful in the DRC, larger projects in safer countries may be able to generate massive emissions reductions. The Copenhagen conference needs to set the stage for these types of market incentives for better climate behavior.
Raising a REDD Flag
A relatively new, UN-backed initiative known as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) seeks to compensate forest-rich countries for protecting or regenerating their forests. However, REDD may have the unintended consequences that further erode the human rights of marginalized people dependent on those forests.
For decades, tropical forests have been logged legally and illegally by states and private companies, without any input from or compensation to indigenous forest communities, who, in many cases, were displaced or worse.
REDD thus raises a troubling question: If countries can generate carbon revenues through REDD, to whom do the revenues belong, and how will they be allocated? Many forestry ministries have a long history of corruption and mismanagement. There are already signs of ministries competing over putative REDD funds. And high-level discussions in only a few countries have included the role of communities and civil society in implementing REDD and distributing revenues.
The Copenhagen conference will be a critical milestone in the global fight to address climate change. Yet it raises significant and far-reaching questions concerning economic development and human rights of the world’s most vulnerable citizens that must not be swept under the rug.
Jim Jarvie is director of climate change, environment, and natural resources at Mercy Corps. In a recent video interview, he spoke to ECSP about how humanitarian groups are responding to new climate challenges.
Photo: Stoves that are more fuel-efficient not only help curb rapid deforestation, but help women spend less time gathering wood in dangerous areas. Courtesy Dee Goluba/Mercy Corps. -
Focus on Food Security as Clinton Lands in Africa
›August 7, 2009 // By Brian Klein In what CNN has dubbed her “biggest trip yet,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has commenced an 11-day, seven-nation tour of Africa that will take her to many of the continent’s most volatile states, including Kenya, South Africa, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Nigeria, Liberia, and Cape Verde.
Global hunger and food security are her top agenda items, as Clinton and African leaders discuss how the United States can help improve the continent’s agricultural sector. Also on the table will be the “Second Scramble for Africa“— the recent spate of developed nations buying up African agricultural land (map) to assure their access to adequate food supplies, which was the subject of a recent Wilson Center conference (video).
More Mouths to Feed
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), one billion people are undernourished. If current population projections are correct, that figure is likely to grow. “In the coming 20 years alone, worldwide demand for food is expected to rise by 50 percent,” note Horand Knaup and Juliane von Mittelstaedt in Der Speigel.
Climate change will compound the already-daunting challenge of increasing food production by further “reducing harvests in much of the world, raising the specter of what some scientists are now calling a perpetual food crisis,” Joel K. Bourne, Jr. explains in National Geographic‘s special report, “The End of Plenty.”
Africa: Ground Zero
Sub-Saharan Africa—with birthrates averaging 5.4 children per woman and a farming sector dominated by small producers whose average yield per hectare has remained constant over the last 40 years—is particularly vulnerable to such a crisis. Both Secretary Clinton and President Obama have pushed for increased investment in the continent’s agricultural sector.
“There is no reason why Africa cannot be self-sufficient when it comes to food,” said Obama at the conclusion of this month’s G8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy. “It has sufficient arable land. What’s lacking is the right seeds, the right irrigation, but also the kinds of institutional mechanisms that ensure that a farmer is going to be able to grow crops, get them to market, get a fair price.”
Launching his book on African food security, Enough! Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty, coauthor Roger Thurow told a Wilson Center audience, “We hope to provide both an instructional and inspirational tale to show that hunger today is largely man-made, that so much is also caused by policies and decisions that span the political spectrum, and to inspire by showing hunger is truly achievable to conquer.”
Pledges of Aid, but Land Grab Continues
Largely thanks to Obama’s prodding, G8 countries agreed to invest $20 billion for farm aid in developing countries over the next three years. However, the leaders were unable to agree on a set of shared principles regarding foreign acquisition of arable land.
A number of relatively wealthy but land- and water-strapped nations, including Saudi Arabia, China, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as many corporations and other investors, have purchased millions of hectares of land in other developing countries. Asia and South America have been targeted by some, but the inexpensive, fertile land of impoverished Africa appears to be the primary prize.
While some might praise the transfer of land to those with the capital and technology to make it productive, questions abound when one considers the dual pressures of population growth and a changing climate. “[W]hat happens with famine strikes these countries? Will the wealthy foreigners install electric fences around their fields, and will armed guards escort crop shipments out of the country?” ask Knaup and von Mittelstaedt.
The Ethics of Land-Grabbing
In completing such transactions, governments often ignore customary land tenure, selling tracts that are already inhabited and cultivated by small-scale subsistence farmers whose families have lived on the land for generations, but who have no formal deed of ownership.
To prevent such exploitation, experts have suggested the adoption of international rules to govern foreign acquisition of agricultural land in the developing world. A report from the International Food Policy Research Institute recommends a broad swath of measures to ensure transparency, respect for existing land rights, benefit-sharing, environmental sustainability, and adherence to national trade policies.
The Devil Is in the Details
Adding to the strong statements by the G-8 and Secretary Clinton, the FAO plans to convene an international food security summit in Rome this November, which will call for the eradication of hunger by 2025. While these are welcome developments, the details remain unclear.- Will a repeat of the “Green Revolution” save African farmers?
- Is it responsible to engender dependence on petroleum-based fertilizers, if it increases production in the short-term?
- What are the implications of selling arable land to foreign investors?
- How will large-scale commercialization and mechanization of farming transform developing societies?
- What about genetically-modified seeds?
- Can we eradicate hunger in the next 15 years?
Photo: Men gather corn at a farm in Kenya. Courtesy Curt Carnemark and Flickr user World Bank (pool). -
Weekly Reading
›A Population Reference Bureau (PRB) policy brief considers several methods of integrating population, health, and environment initiatives in Uganda, citing the Ruhiira Millennium Village Project and the Conservation Through Public Health program as successful examples. Also new from PRB: Farzaneh (Nazy) Roudi explains that Iran’s “youth bulge, along with changes in women’s fertility and reproductive health, provide a backdrop for understanding Iran’s current political instability.”
In “Military vs. Climate Security: Mapping the Shift From the Bush Years to the Obama Era,” Miriam Pemberton of the Institute for Policy Studies compares U.S. government spending on climate change and military, arguing for dedicating more resources to climate security.
A new report from Global Witness reveals that all main warring parties in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo—including rebel groups and members of the Congolese national army—are heavily involved in the mineral trade in North and South Kivu provinces.
In the Spring 2009 edition of The New Atlantis, Kendra Okonski asks if water is a human right, while Travis Kavulla looks at “Aids Relief and Moral Myopia” in Africa, arguing that the Western public-health lobby “must realize that HIV has a social dimension that must be addressed.” -
Weekly Reading
›“The natural resources are being depleted at an alarming rate, as population pressures mount in the Arab countries,” says the 2009 Arab Human Development Report, which was published this week by the UN Development Programme. A launch event in Washington, DC, features New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and Wilson Center scholar Robin Wright.
A special issue of IHDP Update focuses on “Human Security in an Era of Global Change,” a synthesis report tied to the recent GECHS conference. Articles by GECHS members, including Karen O’Brien and Alexander Lopez, address water and sanitation, the global financial crisis, poverty, and transborder environmental governance in Latin America.
An op-ed by Stanley Weiss in the New York Times argues that the best way to bring water–and peace–to the Middle East is to ship it from Turkey. A response by Gabriel Eckstein in the International Water Law Project blog argues that “transporting water from Turkey to where it is needed will require negotiations of Herculean proportion.”
CoCooN, a new international program sponsored by The Netherlands on conflict and cooperation over natural resources, recently posted two powerpoint presentations explaining its goals and the matchmaking workshops it will hold in Addis Ababa, Bogota, and Hanoi. The deadline for applications is August 5.
Two new IFPRI research papers focus on the consequences of climate change for poor farmers in Africa and provide policymakers with adaptation strategies. “Economywide Impacts of Climate Change on Agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa” analyzes two possible options for the region. “Soil and Water Conservation Technologies: A Buffer Against Production Risk in the Face of Climate Change?” investigates the impact of different soil and water conservation technologies on the variance of crop production in Ethiopia.
The climate community is under increasing pressure to help the developing world, especially those at the 
